SA Affordable Housing September - October 2016 // Issue: 60 | Page 30

FEATURE

While political and ideological reasons for this situation
are sought, at root, the practice of town and regional
planning has not changed since it was introduced to Africa.
According to the Council for Scientific and Industrial
Research (CSIR) publication Designing Safer Places (2001)
it is bad urban design that is responsible for the multiples
incidences of crime, road accidents, social disorder, illhealth and class separation.
Nor has town planning accommodated African culture.
Indeed the accusation has been made that Soweto was
deliberately ‘planned’ not to allow spaces for community
gatherings that could generate demonstrations and
revolts.
However, research that arose from interaction with the
Women’s Voice organisation in Orange Farm reveals how
they organise their community practically and safely
which resulted in winning a design award, the INTERBOU
Award in 1995.
When presented to the International Union for Land Value
Taxation in 2013, it was shown how a New Rural Town can
implement the economic principles of (social theorist and
economist) Henry George’s Progress and Poverty - An
Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of
Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy
(1879), to be both economically viable and ecologically
sustainable due to digital technology that can bring most
urban benefits to a rural area. As in the opinion of Thomas
Berry, author of the United Nations World Charter for
Nature and founder of Bioregionalism: “It is no longer
tolerable to plunder one country or region to benefit
another.
“A Bioregion is simply a geographic area, identified by its
chief natural resource, such as rain forest systems, dry
areas, arctic systems, coastal or mountain systems.
Sometime as watershed region, especially where systems
meet and interact. The situation now is that every
bioregion on the planet is faced with problems of survival.
“Bioregions must develop human populations that accord
with their natural context. The local people have no way of
knowing [1] How to keep their land. [2] How to develop
their land, or [3] How to develop their own culture in a way
that they can provide for themselves and not become serfs
to a distant land-owner.”
An alternative strategy in allowing megacities to grow

exponentially and unlimited can be to urbanise rural areas
by building completely new rural towns that can fulfil the
concept of a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ using the
technologies of a digital age as presented by founder of
the World Economic Forum (WEF) Klaus Schwab in 2016:
“We are at the beginning of a revolution that is
fundamentally changing the way we live, work, and relate
to one another. In its scale, scope and complexity, what I
consider to be the fourth industrial revolution is unlike
anything humankind has experienced before.
“The changes are so profound that, from the perspective
of human history, there has never been a time of greater
promise or potential peril. We have yet to grasp fully the
speed and breadth of this new revolution. Consider the
unlimited possibilities of having billions of people
connected by mobile devices, giving rise to
unprecedented processing power, storage capabilities and
knowledge access. Or think about the staggering
confluence of emerging technology breakthroughs,
covering wide-ranging field.
“It is not only changing the ‘what’ and the ’how’ of doing
things but also ’who’ we are. Systems impact: It involves
the transformation of entire systems, across (and within)
countries, companies, industries and society as a whole.”
A New Rural Towns urbanisation strategy ultimately builds
up the prosperity of rural areas to correct migration from
rural areas to the ‘prisons of the poor’ through residents
discovering for themselves the ‘Fortune at the Bottom of
the Pyramid,’ defined by CK Prahalad by people drawing
upon their own human social and financial resources in
creating employment, in supplying all basic needs and
community amenities – all uniquely within walking
distance of home. Indeed, calculations have been made
that a town of around 70 000 people can assemble the
greater proportion of all its essential needs – even
assembling the most sophisticated products supplied from
metropolitan manufacturers.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Antony V Trowbridge works for the Inter Africa Plan, a
research associate of the Da Vinci Institute for
Technology Management. He won the INTERBOU Award
in 1995 for his e-village project that aims to provide
human settlements that are fully economically viable
and ecologically sustainable.

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